Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Licensing Overview

This is a little Overview how you can license Windows Server 2008 R2 in a Hyper-V Environment. One of the biggest advantages of Hyper-V over VMware are the included Guest OS Licenses. For example if you buy a Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter license (of each CPU of your physical Server) you can deploy unlimited Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Virtual Machines on this Host.

One Response to Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Licensing Overview

In my environment there is a host with two physical processors with 8 virtual machines and want to license these virtual machines, so I’ll need two licenses of Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise for each of the physical processsadores? I will be licensing the 8 virtual machines.

Anyway, you need a Windows license for each processor that exists in the host? If there are 3 physical processors on the host, then I’ll need to have 3 licenses of Windows Server?

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My name is Thomas Maurer. I am a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. I am part of the Azure engineering team and engage with the community and customers around the world. I am located in Switzerland. I am focusing on Microsoft technologies, especially cloud and datacenter solutions based on Microsoft Azure, Azure Stack and Windows Server. Opinions are my own.